Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

@Shadowplay

RE: Huge billboards in the US. My first trip to Europe – Netherlands – I noticed the lack of billboards along the roads. It never occurred to me that these billboards were particular to the US, though. At the time, I thought maybe they were prohibited in Holland…maybe the Dutch didn’t appreciate those eyesores along their roads, or something. LOL, joke’s on me.

Europe doesn’t have many people making long highway commutes between point A and point B. The US and Canada do. Billboards only make sense as an advertising method in the latter, as a result.

Europe doesn’t have many people making long highway commute

Also, in the UK, motorway billboards are illegal. That’s why you see so many farm vehicles parked in fields that ‘just happen’ to have writing on them.

@Valentin: I did see them in Italy, now that I think about it. Not as many as in the US, though.

@Alan Robertshaw: Why are they illegal? I’m genuinely curious.

Overall, there didn’t seem to me to be as much advertising signage in Holland and Italy, as there is in the US.

@Kupo

Yes, it was a sarcastic comment for a fairly blatantly transparent bit of sexism (as well as the opportunism). Should have done the /s, sorry.

@Weird Eddie

Are you sure it was the storm that froze your window shut?

the “stolen identities” part definitely applies to the U.S. and Canada’s treatment of indigenous people

Hmmm… I have trouble agreeing with this one regarding Canada and to a similar, but lesser, extent the US, at least in relation to the initial comment regarding Russian culture being a mixture of cultures stolen through conquest. The prevailing Canadian culture is a hodge-podge of English/French/Scottish/Irish, and the remaining commonwealth connections to the UK have kept them relatively strong. It’s only been a half-century since the Orange Order faded from power in English Canada, well within living memory. Similarly, Quebecois culture emerged from the tension of the francophone Lower Canadians living under British rule following the fall of New France.

The Residential School system, the Sixties Scoop, the ’67 White Paper, every policy discussion from Confederation until Meech Lake has been focused on snuffing out indigenous culture rather than incorporating it into the Canadian tableau. It was clear that the European Canadians wanted nothing from the aboriginal peoples save territory and resources. If their culture had any use, it was to be commodified by white people as some kind of exotic “other”.

Granted, I live in what was Upper Canada; there may very well be different dynamics in places like Manitoba or Saskatchewan with broader Metis populations. But I think it’s safe to say we stole their identities to eradicate them and remake them in our “proper” Christian image, not to incorporate any aspects of it.

For your consideration, Sam Bee’s latest fucking video, in case you haven’t seen it yet:

@Katamount

Thank you for the link up page. Must admit, I’d never heard of the woman before she got mentioned in this thread.

Sounds a bit like Tomi Lauren from the article – a pretty face put up to jack the conversation.

@VP

Not sure if I buy it. Trump having a thing with a porn star – that I can easily believe.
Trump using his own cash for anything? Or believing something needs be hidden? That’s more difficult to swallow. He never has done either without a lot of protesting.

@abars01

I find it hilarious that you mentioned La Blue Girl, which has possibly one of the most hilarious English dubs of any hentai series I’ve laid eyes on. Back the precocious years of the mid-aughts, when I was in my later teen years and had just got my first personal computer, I probably downloaded it using KaZaA or Morpheus and the clips were so funny I had to show my brother and to this day, we still quote it for a hearty belly laugh.

To this day, I still wonder how one gets a gig doing that kind of dub work and how you stay sane making those sounds and saying that awful dialogue without cracking up.

@Shadowplay

I don’t know what to think at this point, other than it’s in the WSJ, so not exactly a publication the GOP sneers at.

@GOSJM

“The “conservatives” are not really pro-Russia, they are pro-Putin. They admire him for his strength, his homophopbia, and his authoritarian style. They consider him a strong ally of their effort to promote White Christian values and culture against what they consider an invasion by brown non-Christian people. Whether it is true or not, they consider him a powerful ally against Islam”

Yeah, this.

I don’t think I’ve met very many people racist against Slavic people in the left either, although I believe that they exist. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that Slavic people are generally considered fully “white” in liberal communities, anyway. But I could be wrong.

The right certainly considers Slavic people exotic “others” though. They give the women the same gross objectification that they give to Asians and Hispanics.

@mrex: Heh. Fireworks. I have a nephew from New Jersey who visited me in Pennsylvania some time ago…I think he only agreed to come for the visit with his father, my half-brother, in order to purchase fireworks at all the roadside stands. Legal in Pennsylvania, not in New Jersey.

@Shadowplay

Good. Still prefer to be careful, as talking about someone’s internals can be sensitive in unexpected spots, even when they ask.

I entirely agree. I’ve tried to learn how to make use of and seek out good sources of criticism. I run my thoughts by others with TS and ADHD as a matter of habit and like to hear other ways of experiencing things. I’ve done the same when it comes to places where the literature brings in people with diagnoses that I do not have like sensory hypersensitivity and people with autism. And the same goes for many other places like potential effects of sexism and other bias. I’d be foolish not to since aggression and dominance behavior is a strong theme in the nature of the tics, urges and obsessions in TS and self-control is a thing I think about more than most people. If the way I describe my internals becomes relevant to you I’m comfortable answering questions. There is no other way to approach it if we want to really understand how brains and society work anyway.

It’s not reproducible, because it’s pretty much impossible to factor all the inputs that make up an output since you have no control over the pathways the stimuli take to reach the response segment. Thought isn’t a reflex arc.

90% of the time you’ll get hungry if you smell bread baking. The other 10% can be anything from depressed to irritated to reminded that your keys are in your other coat. Same stimulus – multiple possible responses, with one (call it the base response) being likely and the others being completely unpredictable but equally valid.

Can you tell me what you mean by “reflex arcs”? Otherwise thought seems to be a cyclical process and the urges related to the reflexes take place within that. Like when someone calls your name in a crowded room (and I’ll still expect there are people that might be resistant to the effect). I think of it as a “peripheral attention” to go along with our “center of attention” until there’s something better. I picture our urges-to-action as arising out of that relative to the part of attention we are exerting conscious control of (not a static entity in any human being, see mindfulness meditation and being familiar with your enteroception).

“It” might benefit from some more precision here and I like the opportunity to look at this (Let me know if I’m anywhere near examples you are concerned with). In some means of thinking about mental mechanisms society is choosing the mechanism and I am using what we know to respond to it in a more effective way. For example generation of political insults. “Fake news”, “SJW”. That’s a repetitive human behavior right there I happen to have some experience grappling with:), but acknowledge that our language really sucks in general here and collecting the ways that it’s sucks is useful.

Is “it” a mechanistic issue related to my expressions about myself or another person? Bias related to self-observation is worth distinguishing from bias related to other people. I think I can claim more accuracy to a slice of the human experience but it does require care in use, but that’s on top of general concerns about bias in how we see one another so I can imagine paths to less accuracy from bad assumptions about myself that could be there too.

This might be interesting relative to objective descriptions of behavior and mechanistic views of behavior since I’m still thinking broad terms about what I’m picking up on in arguments. Right now I’m trying to engage someone (I’m willing to link if requested) who keeps pleading that a media site not delete any of their comments. They are doing this while criticizing the author of an article using absolutely no specifics beyond essentially “Those French women say you are doing feminism wrong” with no quotes or links. And I know that this site leaves the blank deleted comment behind and they have no examples links. Maybe they had a comment deleted and maybe they didn’t, but it’s interesting how much this looks like the well-poisoning fallacy used against the site, author and maybe even community if this is a tactic. (Fallacies have features that demonstrate rule-based social behavior). I’ve begun requesting quotes from the French women in question and asking how they are relevant to the criticism of the example of rape culture being criticized by the article.

Bigot behavior is definitely related to problems here in a general sense (and I assume that as a human being I’ll always be needing to work on it independent of were I am on any social axes). Among other things I like to think about that in mechanistic terms since it would help in dealing with bigotry. A mechanistic approach to interacting with bigotry as a problem seems like something that could be reasoned about with the things we know now.

Doesn’t mean the mechanistic approach is invalid – it is a useful tool, and you have had success with it, right? Just adjust your margins of error, and don’t stress over odd results to a given social stimulus.

There are places where I see that people are happy with what I do, but it’s very difficult (perhaps unavoidably so) to glean meaning from some situations, especially when political complications exist. So I get “activity stops” and little else. Let me give you an example.

There is a lot of rhetoric in our language regarding the word emotion and I think I’ve managed to find a way to checkmate a bunch of it, specifically the business regarding the idea of an “emotional argument” here. Someone “acting emotionally” or “arguing emotionally” is technically a nonsense statement because (and I’m using very specific wording here), feelings of emotion are present in every thought. Emotion is in part value information that comes along through body feelings. Emotion is present even when reason and logic are used.

It’s an accusation of irrationality and/or logical problems that works by avoiding what perceptions or memories the feelings are attached to. The list is not endless but I think it’s reasonable to consider basic emotions that might motivate social retreat from another person’s words. They smell like prey to me and I’ve yet to see substantive responses to it and I often see aggressive posters suddenly stop and a stay stopped when I’ve called it out. It’s complicating judging that sort of a “response” and I normally just try not to think about it.